Biological systems by default involve complex components with complex relationships.
To decipher how biological systems work, we assume that one needs to integrate information
over multiple levels of complexity. The songbird ...

Our findings provide magnetoencephalographic evidence that the mismatch-negativity
response to two-note chords (dyads) is modulated by a combination of abstract cognitive
differences and lower-level differences in the auditory ...

It is essential to keep track of the movements we make, and one way to do that is
to monitor correlates, or corollary discharges, of neuronal movement commands. We
hypothesized that a previously identified pathway from brainstem ...

Activation of frontal and parietal brain regions is associated with attentional control
during visual search. We used fMRI to characterize age-related differences in frontoparietal
activation in a highly efficient feature ...

BACKGROUND: Anxiety produced by environmental threats can impair goal-directed processing
and is associated with a range of psychiatric disorders, particularly when aversive
events occur unpredictably. The prefrontal cortex ...

Social context has been shown to have a profound influence on brain activation in
a wide range of vertebrate species. Best studied in songbirds, when males sing undirected
song, the level of neural activity and expression ...

Hummingbirds have developed a wealth of intriguing features, such as backwards flight,
ultraviolet vision, extremely high metabolic rates, nocturnal hibernation, high brain-to-body
size ratio and a remarkable species-specific ...

In the absence of salient sensory cues to guide behavior, animals must still execute
sequences of motor actions in order to forage and explore. How such successive motor
actions are coordinated to form global locomotion ...

Functional MRI was used to investigate the role of medial temporal lobe and inferior
frontal lobe regions in autobiographical recall. Prior to scanning, participants generated
cue words for 50 autobiographical memories and ...

The frontal eye field (FEF) and superior colliculus (SC) contribute to saccadic eye
movement generation, and much of the FEF's oculomotor influence may be mediated through
the SC. The present study examined the composition ...

Spoken language and learned song are complex communication behaviors found in only
a few species, including humans and three groups of distantly related birds--songbirds,
parrots, and hummingbirds. Despite their ...

Song-learning birds and humans share independently evolved similarities in brain pathways
for vocal learning that are essential for song and speech and are not found in most
other species. Comparisons of brain transcriptomes ...

Adaptive choice behavior depends critically on identifying and learning from outcome-predicting
cues. We hypothesized that attention may be preferentially directed toward certain
outcome-predicting cues. We studied this ...

Although it is known that brain regions in one hemisphere may interact very closely
with their corresponding contralateral regions (collaboration) or operate relatively
independent of them (segregation), the specific brain ...

Infants' speech perception abilities change through the first year of life, from broad
sensitivity to a wide range of speech contrasts to becoming more finely attuned to
their native language. What remains unclear, however, ...

The widely used blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) signal during brain activation,
as measured in typical fMRI methods, is composed of several distinct phases, the last
of which, and perhaps the least understood, is ...

The inferior colliculus (IC) is thought to have two main subdivisions, a central region
that forms an important stop on the ascending auditory pathway and a surrounding shell
region that may play a more modulatory role. ...

To understand the neural basis of human speech control, extensive research has been
done using a variety of methodologies in a range of experimental models. Nevertheless,
several critical questions about learned vocal motor ...